A few weeks agao we had a Hack session down at my buddy's place in PA. We accomplished many things but the BIG thing was getting his DEC PDP-11/70 up and running, running on a DEC VT-320 terminal.

After we celebrated, by dreaming up even bigger things to do with it(install an Ethernet interface and get it on the net!). wE THEN DECIDED TO USE THE SMALLER pdp-11/23 setup to see if we could archive a set of 8" DEC floppy discs (the 11/70's floppy drive broke a belt). We where able to read all 10 floppy discs and get off all of the data.

One of the programs was called SPACE.SAV which in DEC parlance is an executable file. Typed in run and up on the terminal came Space Invaders!

The implementation is quite good, since it is a terminal graphics are rendered using ANSI characters, there is even animation of those chars, all pretty good for a data rate 0f 9,600 Baud.

There is also a bit of humor built into the game, if you just sit there and do nothing, get bombed and have a very low score, instead of saying 'High Score" at the top of the screen it says 'What utter crap"

The PDP/11 series of computeres are quite different then the Altair 8080 and IMSI 8080 that where offered to the consumer. The PDP/11 is a 16 bit minicomputer series that was very popular with research organizations, Bell Lbas had tons of them and Dennis Ritchie co wrote UNIX for use on the 11.

The IMSI commands a high price because it was "The computer in War Games" The Altair because it was the first packaged kit computer that you could buy, and the first one Bill Gates and crew wrote a BASIC interpreter for. Neither computers where very high power but hey we are talking 1975 and most people had never seen anything like it on a desk in the home.